How To Use Rich Snippets: SEO Benefits & Examples

October 19th, 2012

Anyone who’s ever done multiple searches to find out information knows how monotonous and boring it can be to scroll through pages and pages of text-only search results. After staring at a few pages of Google searches, your mind can become so frazzled you forget what you were looking for. Thankfully, search engines have introduced a handy aid that can add some relevant zest to results: rich snippets. Rich snippets are informational chunks of text that show up in search results for certain types of searches, and they can be extremely beneficial to searchers. Read on to discover how to use rich snippets and the SEO boost you can get when you add rich snippets to your site.

Using Rich Snippets

First of all, you must determine if your site will benefit from using rich snippets. Right now, rich snippets can be used for these types of content: reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, music and video. If your site isn’t related to any of these categories, don’t worry about using rich snippets. If you can use rich snippets, though, do it! There are three types of formats that Google supports for rich snippets: microdata, microformats and RDFa. Google has stated that it prefers microdata, so if you are unfamiliar with any of these formats, microdata is the way to go. Once you know which format you want to use, mark up your content. Google does a great job of explaining how to add rich snippets markup to your current HTML, and they even provide a handy rich snippets testing tool to let you see if you’re doing it right. Once you have it figured out, you’re all set! Next time your webpage is crawled, your rich snippets will appear in results. Of course, if you don’t want to deal with all of the heavy coding, there are rich snippets tools that will make your life easier, such as Schema for WordPress. Rich snippets provide searchers with more relevant information that will help them choose the right site the first time, which is hopefully yours!

Rich Snippets and SEO

So, if rich snippets are just markup and not metadata, and Google doesn’t use markup in its search rankings, how do they help your SEO? It’s simple: they make your search listing more attractive and draw the right clicks to your site. Most people would admit that, in a search results page full of blue links and black text, anything that looks different will draw their attention, whether it is a picture of a delicious recipe or a rating of a restaurant or the track listing for a music album. By adding rich snippets, you give yourself a leg up on the competition that doesn’t use them, and will automatically get more eyes on your result. Furthermore, when you use rich snippets, you give the searcher more information without clicking on your page. If they decide the information is relevant to them, they’ll click through and be far less likely to leave immediately, which Google sees as a positive thing. Rich snippets truly optimize your search results, by making them look better and helping them find the right customers.

Now, Add Rich Snippets!

Now that you know how to use rich snippets and what rich snippets do for SEO, what are you waiting for? Add some rich snippets to your site and enjoy the boost you get from search!